April 11, 2011

From the Houston Chronicleon the Obama Administration's assiduous efforts to make it harder for employers to hire good employees:

P. David Lopez, general counsel for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, was in Houston recently to speak before a conference about race discrimination and his agency's efforts to take on large-scale, nationwide investigations. ...

Q: What are the big, cutting-edge discrimination issues facing the EEOC?

A: We're going through difficult economic times right now. It's important to us to identify discriminatory hiring practices and policies that are excluding people unlawfully from the workplace.

I think the EEOC is in a unique position to do that. We're able to look at the patterns within a particular employer in a way a private individual isn't. You often don't know why you weren't hired. We can examine an employer's reasons and try to identify if there were any hiring screens.

We have a race discrimination case out of Chicago (that involved) a contracting company for custodial services. They had a predominantly Eastern European and Latino workforce and the (lack of) representation of African-Americans compared to the availability was statistically significant. They were using either word-of-mouth recruitment practices or relying on certain ethnic press.

We resolved it for $3 million and approximately 550 people benefited - the people who applied but weren't hired. The consent decree requires the company to actively recruit African-Americans. The whole goal is to make sure it doesn't happen again.

Another case we filed is a nationwide challenge to criminal arrest and conviction screens. We challenged that as having a disparate impact against African-Americans and Latinos. That is still pending in Baltimore.

I watched some of The Wire, and thank God the Obama Administration is cracking down on employers discriminating against criminals in Baltimore. These companies will make much higher profits once the Obama Administration forces them to overcome their bias against Baltimore convicts. Who wouldn't want to hire Baltimore's crooks? Didn't President Obama say Omar, the gay gunman, was his favorite character on The Wire? I don't want to be guilty of insider trading, but you should buy Baltimore real estate now, because, obviously, employment in Baltimore is going to boom once the Obama Administration stops all this irrational discrimination against Baltimore's armed robbers and murderers. Who wouldn't want to be an employer in Baltimore once the Obama Administration is in charge of your hiring policy?

Oh, now I notice that this case is "nationwide." The case is pending in Baltimore merely because the Obama Administration just wanted a jury of Wire characters. So, good times are here again ... nationwide!

Another one was filed in Ohio and we're looking at the use of credit reportsto screen out applicants. We allege it has a disparate impact against African-Americans.

Credit checks and criminal screens (were big) in the '70s and '80s and sort of disappeared but with the new economy, employers are adopting these types of employment screens. That is something that has generated a lot of interest at the EEOC.

Q: Why are more employers using credit scores and criminal convictions to weed out job applicants?

A: My speculation is that employers are in a position to generate much more interest in jobs and they're looking for shorthand ways to screen applicants. If we're able to establish disparate impact, then it's the employer's burden to demonstrate the hiring qualification is job-related.

(Employers) say it relates to honesty and performance. But that's where most of the litigation and discussion has centered - whether these screens can really be job-related and a business necessity.

Q: With so much information available online about virtually everyone, how much checking should an employer do before making a hiring decision?

A: I think they need to be very cautious doing online background checks.

There is the potential that if employers do that, certain classes of individuals will be scrutinized more heavily and you'll only look at the Facebook pages of certain applicants. There are potentially disparate treatment implications in doing that.

Imagine that you are an employer, and that you have 3 applicants for a low-level job.1. John - white, no gaps in work history, and he demands minimum wage+20%2. Jamal - black, gaps in recent work history not due to incarceration, and he demands minimum wage.3. Demetrius - black, gaps in recent work history due to recent incarceration, and he demands minimum wage.

Given all information, the employer will consider Jamal preferable to Demetrius, and probably to John also, unless the employer is willing to pay up front20% for his racism.

Now, if the employer can not know reasons for gaps in work history, then he might well assume that both Jamal and Demetrius are criminals, and should be avoided. He is thus willing to pay 20% extra to avoid a potential problem.

But the politicians have no formal schoolig in game theory, so theycan not get their heads around this.

The Jewish fundamentalists and segregationists who set up a meat processing operation in Postville, Iowa imported lots of poor Eastern Europeans, stacking them up in houses they bought in Postville.

Wisconsin Dells, a very popular summer vacation spot in Central Wisconsin, uses tons of Eastern European young people for seasonal labor. The only native English-speakers they hire nowadays are kids who deal with the public: desk clerks, etc.

It's all about blacks, isn't it, they're the only group on this planet worth worrying about and expending all our resources on. If this custodial company discriminated against East Europeans nothing would ever even be said. The only reliable workers willing to push a mop at midnight are the Europeans and Hispanics. Few blacks want those jobs or are willing to work at the required pace. So being a criminal, being a deadbeat and being black fairly well overlap? We all knew that, didn't we, but I guess it's now official. Hire a thug today. It's bad for the other employees when lousy workers are introduced into the work environment. But what's good for them is not important. The only point of view to be considered is what's best for blacks

Obama is in office solely to divvy up the civil rights loot. Constitutional law, geopolitics, national security, that's womens work.

The EEOC's Chief Legal Gnat has an interesting perspective:

A: Pregnancy discrimination. Many employees don't understand it's against the law. Many don't view it as discrimination. But a lot of it is very easy to prove. Some are almost slam dunks.

We had one case, a woman who was a courtesy shuttle driver at a car lot. Right before the Christmas holidays she informed her boss she was pregnant. He fired her because he was concerned she'd be a health and safety hazard because at any moment she could cramp up and get nauseous. It was just stunning.

That has a chilling effect on women who are starting a family...

Single women in menial jobs who have no business starting families, we didn't forget you!

Actually Obummer should have been pursuing his donors on WS, since that is where the really big crimes have been committed lately, so I guess this is just another smoke screen to divert from the real issues and cause some more harm to his natural enemies/victims: ordinary white males.

EEOC: "Another case we filed is a nationwide challenge to criminal arrest and conviction screens. We challenged that as having a disparate impact against African-Americans and Latinos. That is still pending in Baltimore."

So not hiring violent criminals is discriminatory against blacks and Latinos nationwide because blacks and Latinos are violent nationwide?

Its nice that the EEOC admits that.

Is there any job for which we can discriminate on the basis of criminality?

Look how many criminals are at the highest level of government now (e.g. Turbo Timmy and Rangel are two that come to mind...) and look how that is working for us. Why not replicate that methodology at the lowest level of the employment rung.

CORRECTION: I soudl have read further. If the employers in Chicago are using "certain ethnic press", the "Eastern Europeans" likely refers to Chicago's ethnics, many of whom are recent immigrants.

I wonder is why the EEOC is giving all of the Indian bodyshops a pass.

In our town we have a national supplier of Indian IT workers from the owner's hometown in India.

He is clearly avoiding placing whites, blacks or Mexicans in any jobs whatsoever.

Is salary a defense to a disparate impact case? Is it a defense to say that "blacks are offered the jobs, but they just won't work as cheap as imported Mexicans" or (in the case of the Indian bodyshop) "white programmers won't work as cheap as imported Indian programmers"?

"Oh, now I notice that this case is "nationwide." The case is pending in Baltimore merely because the Obama Administration just wanted a jury of Wire characters. So, good times are here again ... nationwide!"

Steve, you are the only writer I know that can make someone laugh reading such a depressing subject. Bravo.

The depressing thing is that the public in general can't connect the dots. The man of the street can't connect Obama's policies to their everyday lives.

I know this to be true because the nice man who checked my groceries yesterday had no idea what QE-2 is - nor did anyone else in the supermarket. I spent $200 for what I hope will be a week's worth of food. Everyone knows that food is now suddenly every expensive as is gasoline - but no one seems to understand the connection to Bernanke and the Obama stimuli.

The Republicans focus the argument on the future (save your grand-kids)and Bill O'Reilly tells America that high gas prices are a plot by greedy speculators.

Debts get paid. Obama would have preferred higher taxes but inflation also works.

After fighting the budget cuts Obama now takes credit for them. Shades of Jerry Brown and Prop 13.

Would any Republican candidate DARE to make an issue of an outrage like this? The only one I can imagine raising it is Donald Trump, and that's why it's fine with me if he wants to get in the primary and take some of the varnish off Obama.

Look how many criminals are at the highest level of government now (e.g. Turbo Timmy and Rangel are two that come to mind...) and look how that is working for us. Why not replicate that methodology at the lowest level of the employment rung.

Who needs brains, talent, and honesty anymore? All that's needed are so-called social skills, diversity, and vibrancy.

Didn't Obama say Omar was his favorite character on all of television? They are definitely charismatic thugs on the Wire, though. Omar, Slinger Bell, that freaky eyed guy from the last season. "Omar don't scare."

Even the black thugs know who to hire when you need a lawyer. Maybe they can be taken down, a la Al Capone for tax evasion, for disparate impact violations in only hiring Jews to defend them.

God forbid a company should use the cheapest, most efficient method of recruiting known to man. Naturally any manager worth his salt would rather spend hours and hours of his time interviewing strangers rather than hire known quantities his existing employees can vouch for.

" a contracting company for custodial services ... had a predominantly Eastern European and Latino workforce"

I'd like to know more about this.

Hasn't EEOC often been used to break up any possible centers of Catholic ethnic power? Nixon's Philadelphia Plan back in the 1970s appears to have targeted the rise of Catholic power, as if in revenge for the usurpation of the WASPs/Quakers there.

"So not hiring violent criminals is discriminatory against blacks and Latinos nationwide because blacks and Latinos are violent nationwide?"

No, not hiring blacks and Latinos because they've been convicted of violent crimes is an example of institutional racism, which is based on white privilege. We all know black and Latinos are disproprotionately convicted and sentenced to prison when whites accused of the exact same offenses would get off scot free or with far shorter sentences.

You see, in the left-wing world view,t he violence of blacks and Latinos is actually "proof" of white racism, one way or another.

Oh, now I notice that this case is "nationwide." The case is pending in Baltimore merely because the Obama Administration just wanted a jury of Wire characters.

The EEOC is headquartered in Washington DC, considering that the Federal District of Maryland is just over the state line, a more parsiminous explanation is that EEOC lawyers just picked the nearest federal court that could claim jurisdiction (why commute to, say, Cleveland, if you don't have to). And you're missing the point that since Maryland has a single federal judicial district, the statewide jury pool is predominantly white (California has 4 federal judicial districts; since CA is too damn big to govern, it could be split up into 4 states based on those boundaries, but I digress).http://www.fedstats.gov/mapstats/fjd/06fjd.html

There's been criticism that the Feds step into state murder prosecutions in predominantly black counties (such as Prince Georges County MD) solely to bring death penalty cases before predominantly white federal juries:As a result of these practices, more death sentences have been imposed in the U.S. District Courts for the Eastern District of Louisiana, the Eastern District of Virginia, the Eastern District of Missouri and the District of Maryland than in federal districts that include New York, Chicago, California, and Florida, where far more murders occur.http://www.secondclassjustice.com/?p=57

yeah i also notice that businesses started and operated by east asians and indians, are not subject to department of justice regulations or civil rights lawsuits.

it's perfectly fine for them to run an operation where they only ever hire 100% ethnic compatriots. the US government never comes calling.

this is, easily, the most frustrating thing about the modern world. europeans create so much from scratch, so many enterprises and industries, universities, sports leagues, and so forth, and then are instantly under attack to deliberately give it all away, with the full backing of the legal system.

it's like the unproductive do-nothing groups just sit around waiting for euros to develop the next thing for them to parasite off of. it's infuriating.

Waiting for the Obama Administration to file Disparate Impact lawsuits against the NBA and NFL for not hiring more White players in ... 1 ... 2 ... 3 ...

Obviously, this is not sustainable. It will break, and hard. Moreover, Obama is not even TRYING to generate patronage, loyalty, and dependence on anyone outside Blacks and Hispanics (and College Educated White women). He plans to cheat his way in if it's 15% or thereabouts.

That's his whole MO. Against his patron, disqualifying her from the ballot. Against Ryan, getting his divorce records unsealed (and leaking them to the press).

> Steve, Why do you have a problem with creating job opportunities for black Americans?

This probably won't do that, not in the long term - I think Headache is mistaken.

Assume people start complying tomorrow: suddenly a lot of black felons get hired, some deserving and some not so much. But businesses sure won't like the situations that the less deserving ones create.

So by ten years from now, businesses will have adjusted. They can make their firms more capital (machine) intensive, they can offshore, make them more skilled labor intensive and semi-skilled labor intensive, pretend like all (or more of) the jobs require a BA - in brief, they'll do what's necessary to become less unskilled labor intensive, so that they don't have to hire the sort of people who are (say) 20% likely to be felons and thus are (say) 13% likely to represent trouble for the firm.

They can also offshore to China/India. But /also/, over and above that, production will decline, because shifting toward something more capital intensive is less efficient than things as they are now, but more efficient than staying unskilled labor intensive at such time as you can no longer screen for felonies.

Therefore, this might be bad for Blacks starting very soon; the intention is to benefit them in the short term - the point is the election in 2012. I'm not saying the long-term effect on Blacks will necessarily be massive, but it does seem pretty likely to be bad, and I doubt it will be minute.

Waiting for the Obama Administration to file Disparate Impact lawsuits against the NBA and NFL for not hiring more White players in ... 1 ... 2 ... 3 ...

Now, see, there is a good point. It simply doesn't get any higher-profile than the NBA and NFL, their "racism" doesn't get any higher-profile, and they're definitely over the limit for small company exemptions, and... the feds couldn't give less of a crap.

So by ten years from now, businesses will have adjusted. They can make their firms more capital (machine) intensive, they can offshore, make them more skilled labor intensive and semi-skilled labor intensive, pretend like all (or more of) the jobs require a BA - in brief, they'll do what's necessary to become less unskilled labor intensive, so that they don't have to hire the sort of people who are (say) 20% likely to be felons and thus are (say) 13% likely to represent trouble for the firm.

I'm kinda surprised lots of companies don't use the small company exemptions. You know, lawyers create a labyrinth of paperwork obscuring the fact that all these small companies are actually a smaller number of larger companies, requiring an army of gubbmint lawyers and years of litigation to untangle it all.

Who said anything about this woman being single? Do married women never work

Shuttle driver for a parking lot is a job that students take to hustle for beer money. Anybody banking on such a job to "start a family," in Mr. Lopez's words, clearly has no business starting one. She's underclass and statistically unlikely to be married.

You'll probably complain if this woman, who loses her job, subsequently signs up for unemployment and/or TANF.

We should extend disparate-impact principles to the whole world. Living in Africa has a disparate impact on Africans, and this is unfair. So let's move them all to the U.S. To not do so would be racist. Everyone should have the right to live in the U.S.

We should extend disparate-impact principles to the whole world. Living in Africa has a disparate impact on Africans, and this is unfair. So let's move them all to the U.S. To not do so would be racist. Everyone should have the right to live in the U.S.

the price of food is directly connected to the price of oil due to how modern industrial agriculture works. byproducts of oil refineries are used for fertilizer.

the price of oil goes up, the price of fertilizer goes up, the price of food goes up. this is how the green revolution works, and is why there are now 5 billion third worlders when 100 years ago there were only 1 billion. the oil age led directly to an explosion in population growth in the third world.

so, when the price of oil goes up a lot, the price of food goes up a lot, and teeming masses of third worlders start having trouble eating. this was a contributing factor to the revolution in egypt, for instance.

due to NAFTA, small time farmers in mexico lost a lot of their ability to produce the volume of corn which mexico consumes, and mexico now needs to import a vast amount of corn from the US. when the price of oil goes up, the price of corn goes up, and poor mexicans start having trouble buying enough corn, and the complaining starts. futher exacerbating the situation is how the US turns a portion of it's corn crop into ethanol - hardly a problem for the US since it generates far more corn than it needs, but a problem for corn importers who have less corn exports to buy.

"Small companies are largely exempt from anti-discrimination law AFAIK."

i'm not too sure about this. personally i think it's just a matter of, there are simply too many of them for the federal lawyers to go after all of them. the .gov now employs thousands of diversity lawyers but they're still outnumbered by existing small businesses 100 to 1. can't hit 'em all. i'll definitely look into actual legal language for definitions and terms, but i've now dealt with several operations in california which were definitely bigger than "small" and which were mainly only hiring chinese or indian employees. operations which had like 200 people and 95% of them were from the same group.

i'm at the point where i'm considering starting a small business in a year or two, and getting mugged by diversity lawyers, or blindsided by an annoying and spurious lawsuit initiated by an angry NAM who didn't get a job or a promotion because he plain wasn't good enough, is high on my mind and one of the things which gives me pause.

not that i expect to be successful for sure. but if i am, successful operations started by and run by euro-americans (which is the vast majority of private sector employers) quickly become targets for a diversity take over when they are doing good and expanding. not that i'm looking for stormfront-like demographics for my employees but i'd like to retain freedom of association and not have government lawyers, emboldened by a potential obama second term, dictating terms to me 5 years down the road.

Its interesting that they state that background checks and examining facebook pages will all have disparate impact. If I as a white man happen to publicly comment that blacks commit more crimes, or behave foolishly, etc, then I have committed a major faux pas in this day and age, and run the risk losing my job, being sent death threats, etc., but it seems to be a presumed fact by the liberal DOJ under a black president. Oh what a tangled web the left weaves...

Also, there's this error that antidiscrimination law keeps making, over and over: Suppose thereis some measure on which blacks, as a population, do much worse than whites, as a population. Since whites do better than blacks on a lot of things, this is common--IQ, income, credit rating, net worth, grades, test scores of all kinds, criminal record, health.

Now, one model of the world is that employers are using these measures as markers for blackness--saying "I don't care about this guy's credit or IQ, but I can justify hiring mostly whites if I use those as criteria. If you think that model describes reality pretty well, than disparate impact law makes some sense.

But there's another model, which seems more plausible to me in most cases: employers care about what's being measured, or something correlated with it. That is, I don't care whether the guy I hire is black or white, but I want him to be bright enough to do the job, and given the IQ difference, far fewer blacks than whites will qualify.

If you believe the second model, forbidding the test makes blacks less employable--it takes away my ability to check to see if the applicant is really smart enough for the job, but leaves me with the knowledge that far fewer blacks than whites are bright enough. I end up with an incentive to discriminate, even though I am indifferent to the race of my employees.

jody: the price of oil goes up, the price of fertilizer goes up, the price of food goes up. this is how the green revolution works, and is why there are now 5 billion third worlders when 100 years ago there were only 1 billion. the oil age led directly to an explosion in population growth in the third world.

So for all the complaining people do around here about the liberals, the Bilderbergers, the Frankfurt Schoolers, the feminists, the CFR, the Rothchilds, the Kennedys, Davos Man, and Jonathan Edwards causing White Plight, it's all really Norman Borlaug's fault.

I always suspected that when we got to the bottom of this we'd find some Upper Midwestern Norwegian do-gooder sitting there.

i'm not too sure about this. personally i think it's just a matter of, there are simply too many of them for the federal lawyers to go after all of them.

I'm just going by the laws I read (which are admittedly few). It's right there in black letters that they apply only to companies with more than x employees. I wish I had a cite for you, but I know what I read.

Same goes for real estate. If the property in question is below a certain size (in terms of units for multi-unit dwellings, for example) the owner may legally discriminate racially in selling or renting. Or rather, the anti-discrimination law in question does not apply.

IANAL though, so in practical terms this may not be true due to other laws overlapping.

Maybe it's a kind of inversion of my logic on "gay marriage." Homosexuals have the same right to marry as anyone else, after all; they don't want the same rights as everyone else, they want special, new rights, to "marry" people of the same sex.

Similarly, men have the same right to pregnancy leave as women - it's not the law's fault if they can't get pregnant. :)

But the most painful piece of federal anti-discrimination legislation is OFCCP.

I have no problem with the gubbmint being PC in its own dealings. My problem is with the gubbmint's dealings adding up to anything significant in the big picture. In other words, I want the government to be running little more than a lemonade stand. Given that, how they run it is their business.

But if the gubbmint's to have more than a lemonade stand to run, then I expect, at the very least, for it to apply its ostensible values in a FAAAAAAAAAAAR more consistent fashion.

E.g., okay, sure, it's worth considering having the government's hiring practices have as their goal a workforce that "looks like America." That seems fair. But there are other considerations. E.g., taxpayers. Shouldn't the tax-recipients look like the tax-contributors? Why should white America be taxed to pay black America? What's "fair" about that?

the price of food is directly connected to the price of oil due to how modern industrial agriculture works. byproducts of oil refineries are used for fertilizer.

Natural gas production is another source of fertilizer, so there goes any 1:1 relationship between oil and fertilizer. Not that you were suggesting such, but you didn't take any pains to disabuse, either.

i'll definitely look into actual legal language for definitions and terms, but i've now dealt with several operations in california which were definitely bigger than "small" and which were mainly only hiring chinese or indian employees. operations which had like 200 people and 95% of them were from the same group.

Oh, don't get me wrong, I wasn't suggesting that the gubbmint wouldn't engage in Anarcho-Tyranny via selective enforcement, far from it. I was just pointing out a fact that a lot of people don't seem to know. The typical American seems to think you can be thrown in jail for voicing racist thoughts, and the typical ethnopatriot doesn't seem to be aware of some of the limitations on "anti-discrimination" (anti-freedom) laws.

"Why do you have a problem with creating job opportunities for black Americans?"

He doesn't. He has a problem with the "disparate impact" policy, under which the executive and judicial branches decide disputes on the basis of the contestants' identity rather than the law.

Heh, typical leftist "argument." If I don't want the government to fund abortions, I'm "denying women their right to choose." If I don't want my pockets robbed by the government, I want to "starve the children."

I have this policy of not reading beyond a couple minutes or a few thousand characters if the author doesn't give me anything. Most of the first page was just pap. I get the point that corporate America is drunk on the Kool-Aid, beyond that, where's the beef?

Sure, it's pernicious and idiotic what they're doing but it's worth talking to your local "liberal" to learn where they're coming from. And that us a conviction that the criminal justice system is so grossly biased against blacks that most of the people we think of as dangerous (black) ex-cons are no worse than any number of white people who have no criminal record at all. Yeah, it's nuts, but it's worth pointing out.

One particularly popular talking point for these people is the DoJ's crime victimization survey. It shows that for violent crimes other than murder whites are victimized no more than blacks. That fact plus the axiomatic one that people are victimized mostly by members of their own group, serves to buttress quite a lot of the "liberal" conventional wisdom.

"And that us a conviction that the criminal justice system is so grossly biased against blacks that most of the people we think of as dangerous (black) ex-cons are no worse than any number of white people who have no criminal record at all."

- Not true at all. Read "the Color of Crime", for starters. In fact the evidence shows that the justice system is biased in favor of blacks (as do articles such as this one).

"One particularly popular talking point for these people is the DoJ's crime victimization survey. It shows that for violent crimes other than murder whites are victimized no more than blacks."

-Why, when you put it that way, it makes me wonder what the fuss is all about. Only murder? Why, happened to me three times on the way to work just last Tuesday!

In all seriousness, whether blacks might victimize me as often as they do other blacks is of no importance- its whether or not there is a significant chance that they are victimizing me period. Whether they are equal opportunity criminals is irrelevant to me.

Here's the Google Wallet FAQ. From it: "You will need to have (or sign up for) Google Wallet to send or receive money. If you have ever purchased anything on Google Play, then you most likely already have a Google Wallet. If you do not yet have a Google Wallet, don’t worry, the process is simple: go to wallet.google.com and follow the steps." You probably already have a Google ID and password, which Google Wallet uses, so signing up Wallet is pretty painless.

You can put money into your Google Wallet Balance from your bank account and send it with no service fee.

Google Wallet works from both a website and a smartphone app (Android and iPhone -- the Google Wallet app is currently available only in the U.S., but the Google Wallet website can be used in 160 countries).

Or, once you sign up with Google Wallet, you can simply send money via credit card, bank transfer, or Wallet Balance as an attachment from Google's free Gmail email service. Here'show to do it.

(Non-tax deductible.)

Fourth: if you have a Wells Fargo bank account, you can transfer money to me (with no fees) via Wells Fargo SurePay. Just tell WF SurePay to send the money to my ancient AOL email address steveslrATaol.com -- replace the AT with the usual @). (Non-tax deductible.)

Fifth: if you have a Chase bank account (or, theoretically,other bank accounts), you can transfer money to me (with no fees) via Chase QuickPay (FAQ). Just tell Chase QuickPay to send the money to my ancient AOL email address (steveslrATaol.com -- replace the AT with the usual @). If Chase asks for the name on my account, it's Steven Sailer with an n at the end of Steven. (Non-tax deductible.)

My Book:

"Steve Sailer gives us the real Barack Obama, who turns out to be very, very different - and much more interesting - than the bland healer/uniter image stitched together out of whole cloth this past six years by Obama's packager, David Axelrod. Making heavy use of Obama's own writings, which he admires for their literary artistry, Sailer gives the deepest insights I have yet seen into Obama's lifelong obsession with 'race and inheritance,' and rounds off his brilliant character portrait with speculations on how Obama's personality might play out in the Presidency." - John Derbyshire Author, "Prime Obsession: Bernhard Riemann and the Greatest Unsolved Problem in Mathematics" Click on the image above to buy my book, a reader's guide to the new President's autobiography.